Web Archiving Integration Layer (WAIL) is a graphical user interface (GUI) atop multiple web archiving tools intended to be used as an easy way for anyone to preserve and replay web pages.
Tools included and accessible through the GUI are Heritrix 3.2.0 and OpenWayback 2.4.0. Support packages include Apache Tomcat, pyinstaller, and MemGator.
WAIL is written in Python and compiled to a native executable using PyInstaller.
WAIL is an application that runs either on your macOS (.app) or Windows (.exe) system.
To install WAIL:
- Download the appropriate package for your file system (
.dmgfor macOS or.zipfor Windows) or see more releases. - Open the package (
.dmgor.zip). - Follow the instructions to drag-and-drop the WAIL application to the correct location on your file system.
Alternatively, WAIL can be installed with the homebrew package manager on macOS with:
This section is intended only to run WAIL from source. To download the compiled application, see the downloads section.
End-user execution is meant to be accessed through the binary file, either WAIL.app on macOS or WAIL.exe on Windows.
To run it using Python for testing, run the following from the root of the WAIL source directory:
Since Wayback and Heritrix configurations rely on absolute paths on the system, checks and interactions with services may not work in debugging mode unless a binary of WAIL (e.g., WAIL.app) currently exists in directory specific to your operating system (see below).
Python is not required to be installed for end-users, just double-click (see above) and go!
On macOS, application icons are stored in a .icns file. To generate this:
- Create a directory to store images:
mkdir wail_blue.iconset - Create 11 .pngs of your high resolution (≥ 1024x1024) image, semantically scaled and named:
icon_16x16.png,icon_16x16@2x.png(copy of the the 32x32 icon renamed),icon_32x32.png,icon_32x32@2x.png,icon_128x128.png,icon_128x128@2x.png,icon_256x256.png,icon_256x256@2x.png,icon_512x512.png,icon_512x512@2x.png,icon_1024x1024.png. - Place the 11 images into the wail.iconset directory.
- Run
iconutil -c icns wail_blue.iconset. This will createwail_blue.icns. - Store
wail_blue.icnsinWAIL/build/icons/when running building WAIL usingMAKEFILE.shon macOS.
then
To log into the container to view the WAIL interface point a VNC Client to localhost:5920. The container can also be accessed via the command-line with:
Once in the container, run the WAIL executable with:
There still exists some issues to be resolved for #2, as will be evident in the reports on the console.